Transformative Theory in Social Research:The Case of the Learning Conference

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Transformative Theory in Social Research:The Case of the Learning Conference

Ib Ravn

Learning Lab Denmark

The DanishUniversity of Education

Tuborgvej 164, 2400 Copenhagen, Denmark

+45 88 88 99 56 (office), +45 28 95 95 01 (cell)

Bionote

Ib Ravn, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Learning Lab Denmarkof the DanishUniversity of Education, Tuborgvej 164, 2400 Copenhagen, Denmark. Email: . His research and development interests are with the facilitation of knowledge processes between people – at meetings and conferences, in networks and in organisations generally.

Abstract

Social-scientific theory usually represents an attempt to describe or explain social phenomena and, sometimes, to criticize them. However, a theory can betransformative in the sense that in using and testing it, researchers may help practitionerstransform andimprove their social conditions, institutions or organisations.This idea is illustrated by a research-and-developmenteffortto help conference organisers develop meeting formats that create more learning among delegatesthan is accomplished by the conventional,lecture-based format. This effort was based on a (transformative) theory of conferences as forums for learning and “human co-flourishing”. Seventeen learning techniques were derived from the theory and were tested as hypotheses: When implemented in 30 live experiments,did they contribute to learning, as specified by the theory? Properties of transformative theory that distinguish it from the good intentions harboured by all change agents include theoretical grounding, a coherent ontology, testable hypotheses, systematic evaluation, external validity and theory-action consistency.

Introduction

The desire to make social research more relevant to human needs and social development has a long and colourful history. It is expressed once and again by book titles such as Flyvbjerg’s (2001)Making social science matter: Why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. Action research was born from it (Susman and Evered, 1978), and so was the concept of mode-2 research,which pinpoints the increasing interweaving of research and action in the knowledge society (Gibbons et al., 1994).

Recently, various fields of social and organisational inquiry have taken what they call a “design” approach. Here, researchers couch their interest in improving social conditions or organisational life in terms of “designs” to be implemented, the research effort being the twin attempts to render this design theoretically sound and to actually test it in live experiments.

Thus, in “intervention research”, researchers start out by fashioning a detailed design for the social-service intervention to be implemented and evaluated during the research process (Rothman and Thomas, 1994). A group of organisation researchers wishes to make a “design science”out of organisational research, taking it out of its current business-school confinement and making it relevant to the needs of real managers and organisationssciences(Romme 2003; van Aken 2005). ”Design-based research” is the concept of choice for a large group of educational researchers who introduce and test teaching methods and learning environments based on designs, that is, plans for how things could and should be different (Cobb et al., 2003).

In the present paper, I wish to complement these efforts by articulating a very active role for social-scientific theory:that of a generalisable design, to be cast as a type of theory to be called transformative, for use by researchers who wish to contribute directly to social and organisational transformation. I will show how a social-organisational domain that is mired in problems may benefit from a systematic, experimental effort based on such a design-like,transformative, social-scientific theory (Ackoff, Magidson & Addison, 2006; Baburoglu Ravn, 1992).

The case to be introduced is a research-and-development project conducted by my group on the topic of conferences and large meetings. They suffer from the well-known problem that they are long on PowerPoint presentations and short on real learning and knowledge sharing. Central to our effort is a transformative theory of the “learning conference” and an associated set of four design principles for learning conferences. From these principles are derived hypotheses for better practice, in the form of seventeen learning techniques involving delegates. They were tested in thirty real conferences: Do delegates actually learn more and get more out of their attendance when we change the conferences as indicated by the design principles and the transformative theory? (For results, see Ravn & Elsborg, submitted for publication).

What characterizes a transformative theory is described next. For one thing, itmust be grounded in our best knowledge of human needs and potentials, just as students of human development, nutrition, mental health and learninghave assumed a humanistic basis for their research.

I conclude by comparinga six-step research cycle for transformative research with classical hypothetico-deductive methodology. They are structurally very similar, but one is concerned with a messy present that the researcher can do little to help change, the other with a desirable future that the very research effort is intended to help bring about.

Research into better conferences

From informants in the conference industry, as well as from common anecdote and personal experience, we learned what was wrong with the typical one-day conference for professional people (cf. Ravn, submitted). Overwhelming one-way communication leaves little opportunity for delegates to reflect or digest the input, let alone discuss it with the other delegates. A meagre five minutes for Q’s and A’s after a presentation is common, and knowledge sharing is left for three short breaks and lunch. This impassive listening produces the well-known afternoon seep-out, leaving the conference decimated. People just do not seem to get enough out of conferences. Can’t we do better?

At Learning Lab Denmark, we picked up the challenge. We designed a research and development project that would elaboratethe concept of the learning conference as well as try out some of its implications. Werecruited five partners in the meeting industry who would supply thirty conferences for us to experiment with. We composed a team suitable to intervention and evaluation: Two consultants would help the conferenceorganisers include more learning techniques and participatory processes inconferences to be held very soon. A researcher would evaluate their efforts through observation, stakeholder interviews and surveys of delegate satisfaction after the conferences. As project leader, the present author wouldsupervise the efforts, while the team as a whole wouldadvance all parts of the research-and-development effort together.

At the outset, the obvious social-scientific research avenue was open to us: Go in and describe the domain, measure its variables and try to create a theory that will model, explain or maybe even predict relevant behaviour. A survey of 1000 conference delegates, observations of 15 conferences and interviews with 50 delegates, with 20 managers who send their employees to conferences and with five learning and communications experts. Such empirical work would most likely enable us to put together a model for the professional conference: What a conference typically looks like, what organisers put into it, what delegates expect and what they get out of it. We would then write a report presenting our findings, including a number of problems we had identified and two pages at the end with half a dozen recommendations for better conferences.

However, this approach did not appeal us. Along with ourmeeting industry partners, we had a reasonably good idea of where things stand in the conference world. A research project that described the present rut and tossed off a few ideas for improvements would have suited neither our aspirations nor those of our partners. We wanted a more proactive theory, a kind of systematic understanding of the domain that would help us and our partners create better conferences, pure and simple. Recommendations for action would have to flow directly and explicitly from this theory. In fact, the research-and-development project should consist in the very design and testing of these recommendations.

A theory for the learning conference

Scratch a conference organiser’s brain and the transfer model of teaching will pop up. Knowledge is held by experts and it is transmitted to the lay audience through lectures and PowerPoint presentations. The transfer model presumes the individual to be a Lockean blank slate, a Skinnerian black box or an empty vessel to be filled with the teacher’s knowledge.

Of course, modern psychology and educational research have documented that people are far from blank slates. Humans are born with a set of predispositions to walk, talk, think, be active and contribute. Long unfashionable, theories of human nature are resurfacing (Pinker, 2002; Seligman Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). They combine with the Aristotelian idea that is the purpose of human existence lies in human flourishing (Paul, Miller Paul, 1999), that is, the unfolding and realization of human potentials and talents. Human nature can be conceived of as innate needs, motivatorsand potentials for action. People are motivated to do for themselves and for others what they do best, they wish to grow, develop and flourish.

On this view, to learn is to be better able to unfold one’s potentials. Learning is not narrowly about acquiring a stock of knowledge, attitudes or behaviours. Learning is learning how to act to increase human flourishing. Through learning, we develop structures in individual or collective consciousness – such as categories, distinctions, concepts, images, etc. – that helpus act better in the world (Argyris, Putnam Smith, 1985; Dewey, 1938) and thus fulfilour potentials as human beings (Rogers, 1961).

Re-enter the conference. If this is human nature, how may we then conceive of a conference? We need to bracket one-way communication; it is generally inefficient and goes against most of what we know about natural learning in humans.Let us see a conference as a forum for learning, mutual inspiration and knowledge sharing—a collective learning space (Kolb Kolb, 2005). People are active by nature and will want to be active during conferences as well. Unlike empty vessels, delegates are brimming with knowledge, preconceptions, inclinations, ideas, projects and things they want to accomplish, on their own or together with people they meet at the conference. We may indeed see the conference as a forum for mutual inspiration and human co-flourishing.

Now, as to the conference program, presentations are fine, but they obviously should not be a source of boredom. This leads toour first design principle:

Presentations must be few, concise and provocative.

Next, audience passivity is out. Plenty of research has shown that passive listening is not very good for learning:

The conference must provide processes for delegates to engage in active interpretation of the input.

People go to conferences on topics that concern them greatly already. If they get to talk about their current projects in the light of the new input, they will likely feel inspired. People learn in their “zones of proximal development” (Vygotsky, 1978), that is, where they are just about to go intellectually:

The conference must provide processes for delegates to talk about their own relevant projects.

Finally, there are other interesting people at the conference, many of whom have as much to offer as the experts on the podium. Why not work that into the conference design much more explicitly than the lazy routine of just providing breaks and free time?Hence, the last design principle:

The conference must provide processes for networking and knowledge sharing amongst all delegates.

So, for conferences to be forums for learning and human co-flourishing, these four design principles say that there must be processes in place at the conference that help people get maximum learning out of the presentations as well help them meet other delegates and share knowledge with them. This is supposed to enablethe kind of mutual inspiration and shared energy that will help everyone fulfil their potentials and flourish together as human beings—in so far as this is possible from a day’s worth of conferencing!

Of course, these design principles are not the only ones that can be derived from the theory of human co-flourishing, and they may even be derived from some theory of a different slant. Nevertheless,the reader probably did not jump in her seat, or uttered “Nonsense!” under her breath duringher reading. It hangs together reasonably well for a first piece of research into conferences.

Testing hypotheses = transforming social practices

Let us ask in what sense this concept of a learning conference and the associated principles constitute a theory, a social-scientific theory.In plain English, we have no problem saying that they are a theory of how things could be, as opposed to a theory of what things are right now. As action researchers Peter Reason and William Torbert (2001) put it, “…good action theory will offer a normative vision of a better state”. Such a theory is testable through attempts to bring about the conditions it stipulates. The theory is good if attempts to implement its various elements in actual practice meet with success, as judged by the stakeholders involved, using appropriate standards. And the theory is poor to the extent that its fails to produce these desirable outcomes.

A first step to making the theory amenable to implementation is to spell it out, that is, isolateelementsof it that predict very specific outcomes. For example, the part of the theory concerned with the delegates’ need to engage in active interpretation of the input presented, that is, design principle no. 2, may be fleshed out as the expectation that if we let delegates discuss the presentation with the person sitting next to them for five minutes midway through the presentation (we called it abuzz dyad), their outcome of the presentation will be greater; they will have learned more. This expectation may be tested in an experiment: when the conference host breaks a presentation and asks delegates to do just this, will they afterwards judge their learning outcome from the presentation favourably?

Obviously, expectations thus derived from a conceptually tight framework and tested in actual experiments may, without stretching the term, be called hypotheses. Not that the testing of the hypotheses through implementation and evaluation is at all easy, but this is a challenge common to all research. The results produced during the testing of the hypotheses will feed back into the design principles and the theory, thus helping us refine both theory and design principles.

Thus, the repeated use of buzz dyads led us to refine their specification: If the dyad is free to discuss anything, people will tend to share critiques of the presentation. While students may usefully hone their critical skills in such dyads, professionals typically seem to be better off identifying ideas they can use in their work. Being critical is an academic knee jerk that many professionals often prefer to avoid, if they can. This realisation led us to propose that the buzz-dyad activity must be introduced in such a way that the conference host asks a constructive question. For example, “What was the most inspiring thing you heard in the presentation so far, and why?” Our refined hypothesis, yet to be tested, is that this will take their minds off nit-picking critiques and focus their conversation on the presentation’s learning potential for them personally, thus improving their outcomes.

Such are the very useful reflectionsoccasioned by attempts to implement the various elements of a transformative theory, that is, to test hypotheses derived from it. The theory is not descriptive or explanatory in the classical sense, in that it does not attempt to explain conferences as they are now. Rather, it is transformative, in the sense that researchers and practitioners will use it to try to transform current practices and institutions into something better.

Values and human potentials

Now, let us face the issue of how a theory can saywhat is better and what is not. It has hardly escaped the reader’s attention that transformative theory as depicted here is rife with values. When I described the theory of the learning conference, I went from an account of human nature and general human capacities and straight to ideas about what a conference that would maximize learning would be like. My guide was, obviously, that conferences should help bring out the relevant aspects of human potentials, that is, our potentials to learn. For conferences to help us do this, they must have the features identified in the four design principles, I argued.

So, we have a (purportedly scientific) theory that says that conferences that conform to our design principles are good, and conferences that do not are bad. That does not sound very scientific. But let us go closer.

A transformative theory works on the assumption that bringing out human potentials is good. This is the humanistic basis of transformative theory. While this may sound fine, a critical reader may well ask how we distinguish our “good” potentialsfrom our “bad” potentials. Indeed, we would not wish for a conference to realize our potentials for being bored and wasting our time. So how to distinguish?